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LIIBil 


HecoJA 


The 

Farther 

Sympathy 


American  Baptist  Foreign  Mission  Society 
Ford  Building,  Boston,  Mass. 


CO 


The  Farther  Sympathy 


FIFTH  AVENUE  and  Forty-Second  Street 
at  five  o’clock  in  the  afternoon  is  perhaps 
the  busiest  corner  on  the  globe.  Limousines 
and  touring-cars,  carriages  and  the  equipage  of 
millionaires,  dray  wagons  laden  with  freight,  and 
surface  cars  packed  with  human  freight  pass  in 
unending  streams  of  transportation  at  right  angles 
to  each  other.  The  blue-coated  sentinel  in  the 
street  enforces  the  traffic  regulation  of  the  law. 
On  the  sidewalk  the  people  throng  and  jostle  one 
another  in  multitudes  —  a  great,  cosmopolitan 
crowd  of  the  rich  and  the  poor,  the  cultured  and 
the  illiterate,  the  successful  and  also  those  who 
under  “the  bludgeonings  of  chance”  have  gone 
down  in  defeat.  It  is  a  great  army  of  humanity, 
eternally  changing,  yet  always  the  same. 


A  CHINAMAN  from  a  nearby  laundry,  in 
disobedience  to  the  policeman’s  signal, 
attempts  to  cross  the  street.  At  once  he 
is  in  the  midst  of  a  solid  mass  of  moving  vehicles. 
Bewildered  and  frightened,  like  an  animal  at  bay, 


he  tries  to  dodge,  then  to  retreat,  then  again  to  go 
forward.  Suddenly  a  big,  red  touring  car  looms 
up  before  him.  There  is  a  hissing  sound,  a  grind¬ 
ing  of  brakes,  a  piercing  shriek  —  then  all  is 
confusion.  The  transportation  system  of  the  city 
is  temporarily  demoralized,  while  instantly  and 
automatically  a  crbwd  of  two  thousand  people 
form  a  circle  about  the  wounded  man  who  lies 
unconscious  in  the  street.  The  universal  instinct 
of  humanitarianism  again  asserts  itself.  Not  a 
man  or  a  woman  in  that  crowd  would  refuse  to 
render  some  assistance  to  this  injured  fellow  man. 
Every  heart  finds  itself  responding  to  the  impulse 
of  sympathy  and  compassion,  and  the  entire 
crowd,  as  it  gazes  upon  the  injured  Chinaman, 
realizes  once  more  that,  regardless  of  race  or 
climate,  all  men  are  brothers. 


BUT  WHAT  about  that  Chinaman  across  the 
sea?  Is  the  instinct  of  humanitarianism  so 
thin  and  so  shallow  that  it  will  not  include 
the  millions  who  are  injured  by  unsanitary  en¬ 
vironments,  wounded  and  diseased  by  Oriental 
plagues,  baffled  by  adverse  circumstances  and 
hopelessly  discouraged  by  countless  unanswered 
prayers  addressed  to  unknown  gods?  Is  the  arm 
of  American  sympathy  so  short  that  it  will  not 
reach  across  the  Pacific?  Does  the  idea  of  uni¬ 
versal  brotherhood  embrace  only  the  injured 


foreigner  on  our  street  and  not  the  man  across 
the  sea? 


TODAY  we  are  hearing  much  about  the 
horrors  of  child  labor  in  America.  Re¬ 
ports  that  stir  up  fiery  furnaces  of  right¬ 
eous  indignation  in  the  heart  of  every  man  come 
to  us  regarding  child  wage  earners  in  our  coal 
mines  and  our  cotton  mills,  our  factories  and  our 
sweatshops.  Church  and  State,  Press  and  Labor 
Union  have  united  in  a  common  crusade  to  drive 
this  terrible  evil  from  our  land.  And  the  opposi¬ 
tion  against  it  is  based  not  alone  on  the  fact  that 
child  labor  means  exorbitant  profits  to  the  capi¬ 
talist,  that  child  labor  deprives  our  boys  and  girls 
of  needed  hours  of  play  and  robs  them  of 
opportunities  for  education,  but  also  because  child 
labor  places  a  heavy  mortgage  on  the  manhood 
and  the  motherhood  of  tomorrow,  from  the  fore¬ 
closure  of  which  there  is  no  escape. 

SB 

BUT  WHAT  about  the  children  of  the  non- 
Christian  nations  across  the  sea?  Will  not 
China  and  Japan  need  the  manhood  and 
the  motherhood  of  tomorrow  as  much  as  will 
America?  What  about  the  hosts  of  child  widows 
of  India  doomed  to  a  life  of  everlasting  despair? 
Are  not  these  as  worthy  of  our  help  and  interest 
as  the  children  in  our  sweatshops?  What  about 
those  countless  multitudes  as  yet  unborn  who  come 


into  being  amid  conditions  and  surroundings 
where  children  are  “spawned,  not  born,”  only  to 
grow  up  in  ignorance  and  superstition,  in  moral 
filth  and  sin,  only  to  spend  their  years  like  “a  tale 
that  is  told,”  to  find  life  a  curse  and  not  a  joy,  and 
in  the  end  only  to  “lay  themselves  down  in  their 
last  sleep”?  What  about  these  as  well  as  the 
children  in  our  mills  and  factories? 


WE  ARE  LIVING  in  an  age  in  which  the 
problem  of  the  American  negro  is  com¬ 
ing  more  and  more  to  the  foreground. 
The  negro  population  has  increased  from  four 
million,  previous  to  the  war,  to  more  than  ten  mil¬ 
lion  at  the  present  time.  The  negro  needs  to  be 
educated.  He  needs  to  be  trained  for  citizenship. 
Above  all,  he  needs  to  be  instructed  in  the  princi¬ 
ples  of  Christianity.  And,  although  he  presents  to 
us  a  problem  which  in  the  minds  of  some  can 
never  be  solved,  we  are,  nevertheless,  making 
heroic  efforts  for  his  intellectual  and  moral  prog¬ 
ress.  Industrial  schools,  colleges,  home  mission 
endeavors  in  the  South  —  all  are  making  their 
contributions  toward  the  solution  of  the  negro 
problem. 

BUT  IS  THERE  not  also  a  negro  problem  in 
Africa  that  demands  our  attention  just  as 
much  as  the  problem  in  America?  What 
about  an  industrial  school  on  the  Congo?  Is  it 


not  just  as  important  as  in  Alabama?  What 
about  that  far-away  mission  station  with  its  pio¬ 
neer  missionary  deep  in  the  jungles  of  Africa?  Is 
he  not  worthy  of  our  support  and  interest?  How 
much  have  we  really  done  for  that  great,  dark 
continent  which  Livingstone  so  fittingly  described 
as  “the  open  sore  of  the  world”? 


IN  OTHER  WORDS,  is  foreign  missions  only 
a  vague,  visionary  dream  of  the  Church,  for 
which  we  annually  raise  a  collection,  or  is  the 
world-wide  spread  of  Christianity  a  real  man’s 
job?  Is  your  contribution  to  missions  given 
merely  because  you  feel  that  it  is  the  price  you 
have  to  pay  in  order  to  retain  your  respectability 
as  a  member  of  the  church,  or  do  you  give  because 
you  believe  that  the  Christian  heritage  which  you 
enjoy  should  also  be  bequeathed  to  the  nations 
who  thus  far  have  never  heard  of  Jesus  Christ? 
Whatever  your  own  personal  attitude  to  Jesus 
Christ  may  be,  whatever  loyalty  you  may  have 
toward  your  own  church,  however  you  may  feel 
the  need  of  brotherhood,  of  Christianity  and  its 
principles  here  in  America,  one  thing  is  certain. 
Your  conviction  as  to  the  value  and  universal  need 
of  Jesus  Christ  is  measured  by  your  interest,  your 
prayers,  and  your  gifts  for  foreign  missions. 


THE  BAPTIST  DENOMINATION,  during 
the  past  year,  gave  for  foreign  missions  an 
average  of  seventy-four  cents  per  indi¬ 
vidual  member.  Think  of  it!  Only  six  cents  a 
month  for  hospitals  in  China,  for  industrial  train¬ 
ing  in  Africa,  for  schools  and  colleges  in  India, 
and  for  the  preaching  of  righteousness  and  justice 
and  salvation  through  Christ  in  the  non-Christian 
world.  Six  cents  a  month  for  each  member  of  the 
Northern  Baptist  Convention! 

E3E3 

THE  CHINAMAN  across  the  sea  needs  our 
help  as  much  as  the  man  injured  on  the 
street.  The  boy  or  girl  in  India  needs  our 
help  as  much  as  the  child  in  our  factory.  The 
negro  on  the  Congo  needs  to  be  trained  as  much 
as  his  brother  in  America.  And  the  whole  world 
needs  Jesus  Christ  just  as  much  as  you  and  I  need 
Him.  And  when  we  once  come  to  realize  and 
believe  that,  and  then  prove  the  depth  of  our  con¬ 
viction  by  the  height  of  our  giving,  the  “evangel¬ 
ization  of  the  world  in  this  generation  ”  will  no 
longer  be  a  goal  toward  which  we  are  aiming,  but 
an  accomplished  fact  of  history. 


For  additional  literature  or 
any  other  information  regarding 
the  work  of  the  American  Bap¬ 
tist  Foreign  Mission  Society , 
write  to  any  of  the  District 
Secretaries  or  address.  Literature 
Department ,  Box  hi,  Boston , 
Mass. 


1023.  1st  Ed.  15M.  Nov.  1913 


